The Chinese government originally mandated that Green Dam be shipped on all new PCs but this pre-installation has been delayed.

The Chinese government never mandated that Green Dam be shipped "on" or "pre-installed". It mandated that it ship with new PCs. It was sufficient simply to stick a CD in the shipping box, although preinstalling the software was also OK. Manufacturers could decide how to satisfy the requirement. It was up to the end user to decide whether to use it or not. The idea was to give parents the option of using filtering software for their children. If they didn't want to use it, they didn't have to.

The software described in TFA is no more a blow for freedom than software that lets kids get around NetNanny.

Yes, but ubuntu is free open-source software and no-one in China knows what "Free" or "Open" mean.

You are a dumb-ass. Not to mention a bigot.

My comment was aimed at the consequences of the repressive politics of China, not it's people, so please don't think of me as a bigot. I am grateful for the freedoms and open-ness of our society, and I merely chose to express my view through irony.

If Green Dam software were required in China (and it's not yet clear that it will be), disabling it might be trivial but the act of disabling it would open the user to prosecution. A Chinese user could 'accidentally' click on a site they should not have seen but it's hard to see disabling Green Dam software as anything but deliberate. Having said that, I think Oberheide's work is commendable.

If you remove local firewall you raise flags on the outer "Great firewall", so this will be seen as a breach anyway, seams to me that local filtering software is only the first stopper layer to reduce number of outer hammerers -- having a local firewall reduces the number of breakers of the main China filtering layer at any given time, so the Chinese internet gestapo can better focus on the particular violators.

"As a pleasant side effect, disabling the Green Dam components within a running process actually increases the security of the end host as the vulnerable code paths within the Green Dam software are no longer exploitable by an attacker. "

That being true, I want to install Green Dam so that I can use Dam Burst. Awesome!! Our benevolent brothers in China have helped to make teh intartubez secure!!!